As Australian-led troops struggle to restore order and
peace to East Timor, another battlefront is raging in Jakarta as local media fuel the
fires of contempt among Indonesians for anything Australian.

While every newspaper outside Indonesia reported last
Thursday that Australian troops had killed two pro-Jakarta militiamen in East Timor, the
country's leading daily, Kompas, ran its story under the headline "Australian troops
admit killing two Timorese residents".

The story was plucked from the state news agency, Antara.
It claimed Australian troops shot into a group of returning refugees.

Three days after the foreign troops arrived in the ravaged
territory, Antara reported that the troops had burned a militiaman to death. The next
week, an English-language daily, the Indonesian Observer, said the troops tore down an
Indonesian flag in Liquica, west of the East Timorese capital, Dili.

The evening newspaper Terbit ran a picture of charred
bodies found in a burned-out truck in Dili with the caption saying they were set alight by
the Australian troops. Foreign media reported that the bodies were victims of militia
terror.

"It is a misinformation campaign," said Colonel
Duncan Lewis, of the Australian Department of Defence.

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